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A mining operation installed Bently Nevada hardware and software to monitor the condition of various equipment, including their
main air blowers. This occurred following a catastrophic wreck of one of the blowers. The wreck resulted in six months of downtime
for the machine, requiring an overhaul and use of a portable rental blower while the machine was under repair. The enormous
cost of this failure provided the necessary justification for installation of continuous monitoring systems, in the belief that they
would prevent a re-occurrence.
In the nearly 10 years since installation, the customer has experienced no catastrophic wrecks and has logged more than half a
dozen “saves” on their machines due to the monitoring systems. These have resulted in millions of dollars in cumulative savings,
paying for the cost of the monitoring systems many times over. In one case, a machine’s rotor was sent to the OEM for balancing and re-work. A contractor
hired to re-install the rotor insisted that the blower case required alignment. The customer estimated this would add another
three days to the outage. Rather than accept the contractor’s recommendations, the customer consulted their Bently Nevada
software for baseline data on the blower’s condition, collected immediately prior to the outage. The data showed no evidence of
misalignment. Armed with this information, the customer decided to reinstall the rotor without a casing alignment. The machine ran perfectly, without any alignment
problems, saving an estimated $5MM in lost production.
In several other incidents, the customer verified that while the Bently Nevada instrumentation was indicating machinery
problems, other systems on these same machines were not detecting any problems. Upon machine inspection, impending serious
failures were indeed found, validating the information provided by Bently Nevada, and allowing the customer to intervene
before the failures progressed to catastrophic proportions. Without this early warning, the customer believes the machines would
have incurred catastrophic wrecks, similar to that which occurred prior to installation of the Bently Nevada systems.
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